This discussion will be in English.

Tickets: 4,00 euros; Sale point: OASRN (from Monday to Friday, 10:00-18:00) and Plano B (on the day of the debate)

‘Pop up interventions’ and ‘performance architecture’ are certainly in fashion amongst designers, artists and cultural organisations. 2012 Culture capital, Guimarães, commissioned a series of pop ups including a straw-bale ‘agricultural mountain’ and a ‘Centipede Cinema’; Porto and Lisbon are home to ‘nomad stores’ and new types of Pop ‘n’ Shop retail formats; even luxury Algarve resorts now develop pop up style Michelin starred restaurants. Around Europe, the popularity of activities such as ‘guerrilla gardening’ and ‘urban hacking’ suggest a desire to find new ways of using public space.

In recent years there has been a sense amongst many people that something is missing as city life is quashed by surveillance and bureaucracy.  This debate examines whether the ‘pop up’ phenomenon and associated activities can both reinvigorate architecture and recreate the city as a social stage.

Curator Pedro Gadanho has argued that temporary interventions in public space help citizens take ‘ownership of the city’. Advocates of ‘performance architecture’ argue it helps reinvent public space through spatial interventions based on the ‘consciousness of the body’. So to what extent do these new forms of intervention present a challenge to the regulation and privatisation of public space? Public design objects, urban works and street furniture are said to stimulate ‘new behaviour’.  But are these really likely to encourage sociability? Or do such attempts to spark public life undermine more spontaneous freedoms? 

Some see pop ups as an important temporary solution to recession and a valuable outlet for architectural creativity. But as big retailers and luxury restaurateurs jump aboard, is there a danger that pop ups represent less a challenge to the economic downturn as much as an indication of a lack of genuine alternatives?